Today was the day we went to St Giles to perform the piece we had created for them. We went straight into rehearsing the piece; Siobhan made sure that everything that we had created in the space of two weeks was to a good enough standard.
The piece that she spent the most time on was the dance piece that she had previously said was really messy. When I was sitting on the sides and observing, I could not see any faults, since I am not a dancer so I don't have an eye for dance mistakes, however after they responded to her feedback, I could see the piece had improved massively! One of the changes that she made was that, instead of a group of them spinning in the same direction, they would mirror each other; at first, I wasn't sure since I enjoyed the idea of them all going in the same way however after seeing it, I could see the piece improving a lot.
We then ran the piece. 'Can You Hear St Giles Sing?' was completely fine as we all knew what we were doing and it was clear that everyone was fluent on their signs for the ending. We then went onto rehearsing 'At The End Of The Day', which needed a lot of work on timings, especially for the last verse.
After cleaning that piece up, we ran the whole piece before getting lunch and making our way to St Giles. When we were on our way, we were all playing games, which showed me how comfortable we all now feel around each other after playing those bonding games on Friday, which makes me think that we should've done them on the first day of meeting each other.
When we arrived, we could hear the children singing in one room as they were practicing for their Jack Petchy performance that night. When the curtain was pulled back, revealing us, I heard one of them say in shock, 'Wow I can't believe the BRITs were watching us!', which really made me think how highly they look at us and our school! It also made me want to do a good performance for them!
We had time for one through before our audience was let in. We were told that we were going to perform it twice with a short interval in between. The run through went well and I was ready to perform to our audience.
Our first run was successful as it all seemed to flow well. We all had our cues well-timed and some of our moves got very good reactions from the audience (for example, Dom and Tasha's lifts sparked numerous shocked reactions). A con to our first performance was that Vlad elbowed me in the face when it was our first transition; I hope no one noticed this as I couldn't help but react to the pain.
During the interval, Tasha and I decided to go into the audience and talk to a few students. They seemed like they thoroughly enjoyed the performance as they called it 'extraordinary'! One of the students couldn't speak so they just held mine and Tasha's hands to show their appreciation; this really showed me the reason of why we were doing this performance.
The second time we performed it was even better than the first. At the end of the performance, they all joined in in the dance and we all had a dance together. I could tell they were enjoying it as, when we got closer to the children, they became more alive and active. The teachers said this was the first time they had done something like this and it went so well.
In concludion, I am proud of our group for doing these successful performances as we fulfilled our purpose and achieved our goals.
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